On Rice, Iraq, and the U.S. Civil War

Rice Likens Iraq and Civil War Critics

Rice then offered a parallel between critics of the administration's Iraq policies and "people who thought it was a mistake to fight the Civil War (in this country) to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold."

"I'm sure that there were people who said, "why don't we get out of this now, take a peace with the South, but leave the South with slaves."

This is disgusting and just plain stupid. Rice must be the worst S.o.S. this country has seen for quite some time. This is the same person who claimed the smoking gun for Iraq would be a "mushroom cloud" and the same person who told us the name of the August 6th, 2001 P.D.B. was "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US," and then acted shocked when people were outraged by this. Honestly, how did this women get a doctorate? She is probably the most popular figure in the Bush administration despite the fact that she dishes out just as much propaganda and as many lies as Cheney or Rove. This makes her probably more dangerous than other Bush administration officials.

For her to make this comparison between the U.S. Civil War and the war in Iraq is intellectually dishonest. It is a really bad analogy. In order for the analogy to come close to being appropriate, a foreign power would have invaded our country in 1861, removed Lincoln from power, disbanded our armies, and killed about 40,000 innocent civilians... oh, and there couldn't have been slavery.

Currently, the war in Iraq is not about an indisputable good cause like ending slavery. It is about three groups of people (Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds) vying for control of one country and killing each other in the process, and our troops are getting killed by being in the way.

Pulling our troops out of Iraq is not abandoning some "good cause" as Rice would have us believe because there is no good cause in the Iraqi civil. Instead, I would argue that saving our troops lives is a good cause. The only way anything good can come from the Iraq civil war is if the war ends. Bush's "stay the course" plan is not helping to end the civil war so we may as well bring our troops home.

Theoretically, our military could work to end the war by dividing Iraq into three separate countries, one each for the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites, but Bush is so ridiculously stubborn and in such an extreme state of denial, even in the face of so much death and failure, he will not consider any other options. So rather than listen to reason or logic, he and his adminstration put out unreasonable and illogical arguments like "people who oppose the war in Iraq are like people who opposed the Civil War or like people who appeased Hitler."

Disgusting, stupid and intellectually dishonest.